Everything You Needed To Know About CARLOS SLIM The World’s RICHEST MAN!

Considered by many to be without question the richest man in the world Carlos Slim Helu is an interesting individual that has a remarkable history and background. As a true native of Mexico born in populous Mexico City, Carlos Slim was born in the year 1940 to parents with a Lebanese background. His father actually emigrated from Lebanon to Mexico as a teenager in the early 1900s. His mother was also of Lebanese descent whose parents immigrated from Lebanon to Mexico around the turn of the 19th century. Carlos Slim Helu’s parents were married in the mid-1920s and eventually had six children. Introduced early in life to business strategies and practices by his astute father, Carlos quickly became skilled in all aspects of business. Barely a teenager, Carlos purchased shares in a national bank and was earning money by working at his father’s business. Carlos continued to move ahead in life by studying engineering at one of Mexico’s top universities.

Mexican telecommunications magnate Carlos Slim Helu has catapulted past Bill Gates to become the world’s richest person,according to Forbes magazine. But most Americans still know relatively little about this private man with a $81.6 billion fortune. Following are 7 must-know facts about Carlos Slim:

Here are some interesting things about Carlos Slim Helu:

CARLOS SLIM HELU

He might be called Slim but this guy is neither slim in size nor wealth. Enter Carlos Slim Helu of Mexico, the Superboss of all Billionaires.

• He makes about $30 million per day.

• The 1st Mexican to top the list and the first from the developing world, he is worth an eye-popping $81.6 billion. To appreciate this, he can spend Rs. 74,000 every minute for the next 100 years before finishing his money.

• He lost his wife of 33 years, Soumaya Domit Gemayel (see images on the website below) in 1999 to kidney failure, and has not remarried since. Their marriage produced six children (three sons and three daughters). He described his wife as the love of his life and he learnt a lot from her about sculpture and painting.

• First named the world’s wealthiest in 2007 when he surpassed Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, he has been ranked by Forbes to be the richest man on earth since 2010. At a time, he gained $23 billion in just 14 months.

• He is a Maronite Christian. Across the globe, Maronites number just about 3.5 million. They are called thus because they follow Saint Maron, a 5th-century Syriac Christian monk who spent all his life on a mountain in Syria. He taught miraculous healing and Christian monotheism. Like many other minorities in a wicked world as ours, Maronites have been persecuted over time, with over 50,000 of them being massacred in the 1800s.

• Interestingly, the world’s richest man has some modest sides: he drives himself always even though his convoy of bodyguards closely follow, he lives in a not-too-spectacular six-bedroom house for the past 40 years, and is a mile from his office, a simple building. He says he doesn’t need a bigger house and asks in Spanish-accented English: ‘What I do with a house 10 times bigger?’ In a big house, you don’t see your family, never. You don’t meet each other. My wife and me try to have this family, to, to live together.

• He has no interest in luxurious superyachts or palaces scattered across the globe and for most of the 1990s, he was using a plastic calculator watch (it doubles as his calculator). He doesn’t indulge in designers but confessed he has a weakness for expensive Cuban cigars and of course, fine art.

• He does not travel widely and has no home outside Mexico, something he is very proud of. He stays up late at night reading history books, especially about the legendary Genghis Khan and his art of deceptive warfare. And he never overpays for anything. At a time in Venice, he haggled with a store owner for hours just to get a 10% discount on a tie.

• He also said that he has no interest in being the world’s richest, that making money is not his goal. He has a surprisingly simple strategy for making money: buy up undervalued companies cheaply and build them into powerful monopolies. He enjoys broad support from the Mexican government and is a good friend of the President. When the Mexican Revolution broke out in 1910, Slim’s father bought the companies of his rivals who were fleeing the violence at very cheap rates and by the time the dust settled, he was many times richer.

• Today, he owns the largest companies not only in Mexico but in all of South America. One is America Movil, the 3rd largest mobile network operator in the world, providing services to almost 252 million subscribers in 18 countries. That makes him the Adenuga of Latin America, which also brings to mind an interesting thought: if Mike Adenuga of Nigeria can control all of Africa’s telecommunications, he can easily become the richest man on earth.

• He is also into mining, banking, insurance, railways, bicycles, hotels, construction, drilling, airlines, tobacco, cement, retail, restaurants and printing. He was taught business practices by his dad, and by 12, he had already bought government bonds and shares in a bank in Mexico. He later proceeded to the university to study civil engineering while also lecturing algebra and linear programming. He keeps costs as low as possible. His dad (who later died when he was 13) also taught him the art of book-keeping, record-keeping and how to read financial sheets, a skill that would be with him for life.

• His extent of influence is perfectly captured by the Telegraph UK: The reach of his dominion is so large that the average Mexican will wake up on sheets bought from a Slim-owned store; buy their morning bread from a Slim-owned bakery; and drive to work in a Slim-insured car. They will call friends on a Slim-owned mobile phone, lunch at a Slim-owned restaurant, and smoke Slim-owned cigarettes. It is little wonder that the country is referred to as “Slimlandia”.

• He said he learnt some of his secrets of spotting opportunities early by reading Alvin Toffler’s book, Revolutionary Wealth which he thoroughly read, jotted down, heavily underlined and made comments inside his own dog-eared copy. He is now very good friends with the author. Many people today would rather perish in poverty and ignorance than read or gain any form of tangible knowledge. Just saying.

 – Ankit Yadav